john-lardner - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

There Was No Escaping Ted WilliamsThis piece, originally published as “The World’s Richest Problem Child” in Newsweek, is featured in The John Lardner Reader: A Press Box Legend’s Classic Sportswriting, and appears here with permission from the author’s estate....

H-U-S-T-L-E-RThe great John Lardner's take on Titanic Thompson (True, 1951):...

John Lardner Evaluates Ted WilliamsFrom a John Lardner column for Newsweek, “The World’s Richest Problem Child”:...

The Sportswriter Who Wrote American Better Than Anyone Anywheres

Below is John Lardner's introduction to a 1959 edition of Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al, a fictional series of letters from professional ballplayer Jack Keefe to his friend Al. Those stories are included in the Library of America's new collection. (There was also a comic strip based on the same char...

Who Shot Battling Siki? The Life And Murder Of A Prizefighter

Originally published in 1949 in The New Yorker and anthologized in The World of John Lardner. Reprinted with permission of Susan Lardner. For more on John Lardner, read Alex Belth's introduction to a new Lardner collection, Southwest Passage....

A Sportswriter Goes To War: John Lardner In The Pacific Theater

From my introduction to Southwest Passage: The Yanks in the Pacific. ...

The Real McCoy

Another classic from Lardner, "The Life and Loves of the Real McCoy":...

Lede Time

Michael MacCambridge does us all a mitzvah with his "Director's Cut" series over at Grantland. Earlier this year he blessed us with one of Lardner's best profiles, "Down Great Purple Valleys," which is most famous for its first sentence:...